


As Heavy As My Weight Should Be

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mythology - Freeform, Near Death Experience, egyptian mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-11
Updated: 2011-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn't a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Heavy As My Weight Should Be

**Author's Note:**

> For the kink meme, with a title from Shakespeare. Yes, I researched the average weight of an ostrich plume.

As Heavy As My Weight Should Be  
by Mad Maudlin

The concussive force of the explosion, the heat and the light, blotted out all other sensations; Sherlock felt himself airborne, suspended, caught in the moment before pain and impact--

And then, not.

He was standing in Bart's mortuary, cool and still in the flickering fluorescents. The whole room was deeply, atypically silent, no hint of air conditioning or people passing in the corridor; he could not even hear his own breathing. If he was breathing.

 _This is not a dream. This is not an hallucination._

"Hello, Sherlock."

He turned. Behind him now were two people, who were also not audibly breathing: Mike Stamford and Molly Hooper, in their lab coats, standing at a bench with a pair of digital scales. _This cannot possibly be real._ "What is this?" he asked them, and there was something flat and thin about the sound; voices should carry, in a space like this. The room was just large enough that there should've been a perceptible echo.

"We're just here for a little procedure," Mike said, smiling the same way he did every time Sherlock pushed him--indulgent and a little condescending. He rolled on a pair of neoprene gloves. "Won't take but a minute."

"What do you intend to do?" Sherlock asked.

Mike pulled a stethoscope out of his pocket and settled it around his neck. "Just need to do a quick check of your heart."

The words escaped Sherlock could stop them. "I'm reliably informed that I don't have one."

"Now, Sherlock." Mike smiled again, round-faced and rosy-cheeked, and there was movement in the corridor that did not sound like people. "We both know that's not quite true."

Something in Sherlock screamed _run for it, get out_ but his legs stayed rooted with dream-like logic, though this was not a dream. Mike pushed Sherlock's coat open, and then his jacket, then unbuttoned his shirt; and then there was a short sharp _push_ that took his breath away.

When Mike pulled his hand back, there was a small, pallid lump in the center of his palm, the color of raw chicken, pulsing frantically despite its stunted size. "Oh, dear," Mike said, lightly pressing the end of the stethoscope to one sclerotic ventricle. "Oh, that's not good at all."

"What are you doing?" Sherlock asked, hands flexing in the empty air. He felt neither pain nor a pulse, and was vaguely curious as to whether he now had a hole in his chest cavity. He was entirely certain that this was not a dream.

Very gently, Mike set the--the _thing_ \--on one of the scales. The red numbers flickered, settled: 336.9 grams, well within the normal range for a healthy adult male. Mike sighed, brow creasing. "Oh, dear," he said again. "This will be a close one."

"What are you talking about?" Sherlock asked, but they ignored him; instead Molly produced a plastic bag, of the general type used to store evidence by the police. Inside was a single, undyed ostrich plume. She put on her own gloves, unsealed the bag. "What are you doing?"

"Just a minute," Molly said as she pulled out the plume. Mike watched her attentively. Somewhere in the corridor, Sherlock thought he heard another sound, low and growling. "This is the experimental control."

"This is ludicrous," he said, as she lowered the feather onto the second scale. "A full-length ostrich plume weighs at most ten grams, six on average. The human heart weighs fifty times as much. There's no basis for comparison."

"Just a routine test," Mike said with confidence, as the growl grew louder, as the numbers on the scale flickered--

And then there was heat and light and impact, and Sherlock lay on the tiles of a burning pool. John was kneeling over him, lips shaping the words _don't try to move sherlock just keep still a minute_ thought his voice was swallowed in tinnitus. Sherlock pressed a hand to his chest and felt the same sharp stab of pain, until John pulled his hand back and his lips shaped _fractured rib._

"It wasn't a dream," Sherlock said, because he recognized dreams, because something in that room had been familiar: the wrong faces, the wrong places, but the meaning was the same.

John shushed him, the paramedics drugged him, and Sherlock did not mention it to Mycroft or Lestrade. But for many days to come, on the edge of sleep or waking, he would remember the parts that mattered: the flickering red numbers, and the growl.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Third Time Is The Charm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/389380) by [eanor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eanor/pseuds/eanor)




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